Drug Decriminalization Will Benefit Nations, Abusers

I've never smoked a doobie, rolled a blunt, snorted lines or popped X.
I am awfully sorry that I haven't gripped the true underground college
experience that entails using a controlled substance.

But trust me, I have seen the effects that overdosing and abusing
drugs has on the body and the person.

In my younger days as an emergency medical technician in South Jersey,
I have been in brawls with a dozen people, and I've been slugged and
punched for my trouble. I have tackled a druggie while the cop next to
me was using pressure points to force the guy's coked out brother to
submit to arrest. But, the number of times that I have been in the
same type of situations involving alcohol far outnumber the idiots who
crashed their trucks after doing a few lines.

So, since I think I have established a background in my experience
with drugs, I would like to make an argument that I feel is very
valid. With all the money being spent on fighting the "War on Drugs,"
imagine the money, time and effort saved by the government and law
enforcement agencies if we universally decriminalized all drug use and
regulated the production and sale.

The federal appropriations for a budget to fight illegal drug trade
and intervention and treatment was over $18 billion in 2000, and that
was just in federal spending.

All states combined spent almost $78 billion in 1998. In 2004, the
federal spending dropped significantly to $11 billion, but that is
still a boatload of money.

The states' figures for this year are unavailable, but I can
guarantee, if it dropped, it wasn't by too much. Just over 13 percent
of all state spending in 1998 went toward drug control and treatment,
but federal spending only allocates a third of the drug budget to
treatment, the rest to control.

The states have about the same ratio with more of a devotion to
education.

So, total spending on drug control tops $80 billion each year, with no
relief in sight.

The federal and state governments are spending tens of billions of
dollars each year to combat the influx of drugs into the nation and
effect of drug use on the individual, and these numbers do not include
fighting the crimes that arise from drug use, like armed robberies for
drug money, dealers getting killed for invading turf, etc.

Here comes the radical change I propose.

Make an industry out of the production, sale and distribution of
drugs.

Tax revenues come in from the sale of drugs.

Farms will exist that grow corn, wheat and marijuana.

The farming industry would become alive again.

All tax revenues from the sale of the formerly illegal substances
would go toward treatment and education, much like what Alcoholics
Anonymous and Mothers Against Drunk Driving do. The states could use
the drug money, an average of around $1.5 billion per state per year,
to cure their budget shortfalls or deficit and toward state programs
of education and treatment, and the same thing goes for the federal
government. The Justice Department on both levels would no longer have
to spend money on prosecuting drug dealers and users and could instead
concentrate their efforts on the cases that need more funding.

Even though there would be money needed to fund the regulation of
drugs, it would not be nearly as much as is being spent now. We
already have an overseeing agency - the Drug Enforcement Agency - and
the consumer, through the civil tort system, will also have recourse
to resolve problems.

Making sure the drug is pure at the point of production and point of
sale will cut down significantly on overdoses.

Prosecutors already try people for using drugs during legal activities
like driving, so I see no loss of money at all, and I see a humongous
gain for the government, and, in turn, the people.

Now the first reaction I guarantee I will see is the "How can you
support this immoral activity, my sister died of an overdose." Many
overdoses are not from the fact that someone took the drug, but that
the drug had something else in it that made it deadly.

Also, many deaths are from the fact that the wrong people took the
drug. A good example of this is Nathaniel Jones of Ohio, who people
claim was killed by the police when resisting arrest, even though he
assaulted the officers and tried to kill them. He was a 350-pound guy
who suffered from either right or left-sided heart hypertrophy. The
coroner's report is still sealed.

When you are 350 pounds and suffer from an enlarged heart and you eat
a 28-ounce steak, there is a reasonable chance that it will result in
your death.

The same thing goes for using drugs.

But the government doesn't prevent overweight people from eating that
third hamburger from McDonalds because it is just so tasty. It lets
them decide for themselves what to do.

Imagine the country when Columbia no longer has its biggest import
into our country, letting legitimate companies here and abroad prosper.

It would be a country where the police can concentrate on nabbing the
criminal who shot a paramedic friend of mine and killed his roommate.

We would live in a place where the government lets us make up our own
minds about whether or not drugs are "good" or "bad," and
decriminalization helps them in return by devoting the drug budget to
something useful, like reducing the national debt and space travel.

The people most pissed off by this proposal aren't going to be the
people writing a dissenting letter to the newspaper, but the drug
dealers at 40th and Market streets.

The pissed off people will be the traffickers who get paid thousands
to drop off drug loads in Texas and Florida. The people would benefit,
the wardens of less-crowded jails would benefit and the future of the
Union's fiscal dominance would benefit.

If people abuse the drugs, we will have programs to get them back on
track.

If they drive after smoking a bowl, they will get charged with driving
under the influence.

The government will still be there for the people to help them in
difficult times, but instead of my tax dollars to pay for rehab, it'
ll be theirs since they paid seven percent federal and state tax on
the package of safer, regulated and unaltered marijuana.

James Mack Jr. is a junior majoring in criminal justice.

He wrote this column with red eyes and a case of the munchies.